Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Messaging to leap via cellphones

BARCELONA — European and Asian mobile phone operators, in a bold but risky move to bolster sales of data services, announced a plan Monday to introduce worldwide "instant messaging" via cellphone.

The messages would be an advance on the simple text exchanges that cellphone users now send by the billions every day at a cost of about 10 to 15 cents each. In theory, they would instantly show which subscribers are "online," they would be delivered instantly, and they would appear as complete dialogues on a mobile phone's screen.

In a rare group appearance, the chief executives of five of Europe's biggest mobile phone operators, plus executives of China Mobile and the Indian company Bharti Tele-Ventures, told reporters at the 3GSM World Congress that they were working to make what they are calling Personal IM usable across their different networks within a matter of months.

The telecom industry is clearly hoping that IM will be more successful than was the last technology billed as the short message system's successor, MMS, or multimedia messaging. Multimedia messages include sound, video or pictures. But despite expensive marketing campaigns, MMS failed to take off, partly because the messages are relatively complicated to put together and partly because they have been priced at a steep premium to text messages, analysts say.

The mobile industry's goal is to make IM "simple and seamless," said Rob Conway, chief executive of the GSM Association, a sponsor of the conference and the leading lobby group for the carriers.

Vodafone's chief executive, Arun Sarin, said his company and Orange had signed a deal to make their messaging interoperable and begin the service within a few months.The French mobile operators Orange, SFR and Bouygues have been testing such a cross-network instant message system. The "hundreds of thousands" of testers have proved that the service works technically and can be successful financially, said Orange's chief executive, Sanjiv Ahuja.

Sunil Mittal, the head of Bharti Tele-Ventures, told the conference that all of the mobile phone carriers in India were making their networks interoperable for instant messaging, a tool that he said was well suited for the country's low-income and young mobile subscribers.

On the Internet, America Online, MSN and other service providers have long used instant messaging software to let customers conduct text conversations or "chats" via personal computer. The GSM Association said it was in talks to link such land-line conversations with mobile phone instant messages.

Antonio Viana-Baptista, chairman of Telefónica Móviles, said the systems would be designed to avoid spam, viruses and "inappropriate content."

Microsoft buys search firm

Microsoft said Monday that it had bought a Paris-based search company to integrate its technology with its MSN search engine for mobile phones, a sign of Microsoft's growing emphasis on cellphone software.

Suzan DelBene, vice president for marketing for Microsoft's mobile and embedded devices division, did not disclose the terms for buying the search company, MotionBridge, which is five years old and has fewer than 100 employees.

She said MotionBridge's technology would give mobile phone carriers the ability to let customers search for information, commerce and content within the operator's "closed" services network. It will complement MSN's search functions, which find Web pages on the Internet at large.

"Could we build this technology ourselves? Yes," she said in an interview at the 3GSM World Congress. "But MotionBridge was already out there doing exactly what we were looking for."

Microsoft is making a big push in the mobile phone market, with e-mail software for phones and servers, the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system and its Windows Media audio and video player. The company said Monday that it had licensed its Windows Media system to Motorola.